Growing New Cities
So you’ve decided to build a new city? Great! You gathered all the resources to build settlers, patiently waited while they were trained, and now they have just settled a new city. What now? Introduction Think of a new city as an investment. You are going to spend a lot of resources on this new investment. However, the investment is not going to “pay off” until a few weeks down the road. You want to put resources into your new city and build up its pop growth as high as possible. You will also want to use whatever growth resources you have available. However, you must resist the urge to build any population-decreasing buildings in your new city until it has reached a sufficient population. This is the biggest mistake I see players making, even experienced ones. So follow the steps below and avoid the common mistakes that result in sub-par cities with low population and bad production. The Steps Preliminary Step – Which city should build a new city? If you have more than one city, the question arises “which city should I spawn my new city from?”. There are two basic methods of building new cities: 1. Growth City: This strategy involves building a city that will spawn all of your future new cities. You would want this city to have very high population growth and no growth-reducing buildings. You might have one of these cities if you are in a mid-sized to large country that needs a dedicated city to build workers. 2. Daisy-chain method: this is the most common method. Under this method you will grow your new city according to the steps below. When it becomes time to build another city (and not before) then you will want to build workers to colonize your deposit and build settlers to found a new city right afterwards. You want the colonization of the deposit and the building of settlers to occur close to eachother because you don’t want to suffer the negative 15% growth rate from a deposit unless you absolutely have to. Step 1 Storage The first thing you want to do in a new city is have all your other cities send it enough initial resources to start building storage facilities. After that, if you can build a depot right away, do it. If you have to build a few levels of hut before you can build a depot then that’s what you need to do first. Make sure you coordinate amongst your country effectively so your countrymates are not sending you resources that you do not have room to store. Step 2 Growth Once you have enough storage space to hold enough resources to build a well, build a first level well*. If you need more storage space to build a second level well then build up your hut or build a depot. Keep doing this until you reach a level 6 well. After a level 6 well, it becomes more economical to start building houses. Build 3 level 1 houses, then continue building your well. If you can turn your well into a fountain and/or aqueduct then do it (subject of course to your resource availability and financial needs). If you have any growth resources available, use them. How many resources should you pour into building growth structures? This will depend on the current priorities of your country. If you are building a science city then every player in your country should be helping you max out all the growth structures in your new city as fast as possible. If it is a production city then you might not build up your growth buildings as fast because your resources are being sent off to countrymates that are building more important cities. It’s all a matter of discretion. However, do not hoard growth resources and use them in your production cities when they should be going to countrymates that are building science cities! The best teams in this game act selflessly and get resources to where they are most needed! *If you are far enough in the game that you can quickly build up a depot and build a fountain right away then do that. You will save resources in the end. However, for most of the game it is necessary to build up a few levels of well before you jump to a fountain in your new city. Step 3 Production The third step is to put your city into production- whether it be a banking, science, or industrial city.** This means building growth-reducing structures. When should you put your city into production? This is a tough question that depends on the current needs of your country. If you have to colonize a gold deposit for example, and your country needs jewels NOW, then you may have to sacrifice growth for production. However, in most cases you should put your new city into production when it has colonized its deposit, spawned a new city out of it (if that is what you plan on doing), and reached a population equal to: 1. the population of your other cities, or 2. (ideally) about 10-15% less than the estimated culture cap of that city. (In other words, if you are going to cap in about 4 days then its time to put the city into production) **Military and growth cities have slightly different considerations. After getting a sufficient growth level in your military city you will start building military buildings and troops. Military cities are “put to work” much faster than other cities. The object of a growth city is to reach a certain population level in order to spawn a new city or build workers. Once you reach your target growth level in these cities then you can just leave them alone until they reach the target population you need. Conclusion I hope you enjoyed the article above. The biggest thing to remember is don’t put your city into production too early! Happy city building!